Attack The Block

Neds vs Space Aliens.  Should suck.  Doesn't.


There's something wonderful about Attack the Block.  It's a movie that has a grimy, gritty feeling to it's design.  But its tone manages to subvert that wonderfully.  It's a film closer in feel to something like Gremlins or Tremors than anything else.

We start out being introduced to the five tough-seeming youths, mugging an innocent nurse in a sequence that makes you despise them instantly.  It's far from the first film to do this, to try and show it's main characters as bad then try to redeem them over the course of the movie.

The mugging is interrupted by the crash landing of a strange monster that smashes into a car and attacks the youths.  In response they chase it down and kill it.  A few hours later, the monster's somewhat bigger fellows begin to crash to earth as well.  Violence ensues.

What's interesting is that the film never tries to redeem the boys of their earlier act.  Instead of having them change, become better people over the course of the films events, they're instead presented as complex characters, ones who are capable of both the bad things and the good things that they do.  Their system of morality is strange and almost tribal, one scene where gang leader Moses attempts to apologise for the earlier mugging with the fact that they wouldn't have mugged their victim had they known she came from the same block as them is met with a bewildered response about how it wouldn't have been any better had their victim not lived in the same building.

The film calls a variety of things into question, we see the boys various living situations and while one has an unpleasant life, others are presented as of normal upbringings, it's a nice touch, avoiding singling out any one single aspect of the boys lives as the reasons for their problems.

It's gorgeously shot, showcasing the tower block as variously an ugly blight upon the landscape, while occasionally highlighting the strange structural beauty of the place, the dichotomy of the characters reflected in the landscape.

Notably good is secondary villain Hi-Hats who manages to take a london gangster stereotype and make him utterly terrifying.

The score is also impressive, flitting between sci fi orchestration and urban hip hop seamlessly, before bringing the two together incredibly as the film reaches its climax.

It's a fantastic british film and it succeeds because it cares more about being a great film than a great british film.

Posted in: Attack the Block, Movie Review